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https://www.nationthailand.com/international/40014114

Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan said on Saturday (April 2) that political moves to oust him were an attempt at regime change backed by the United States.

Opposition parties say Khan has failed to revive an economy battered by the coronavirus pandemic or fulfil promises to make his government more transparent and accountable, and have put forward a no-confidence motion due to be voted on Sunday (April 3).

Khan told guests at an official dinner for his party lawmakers that, ” the conspiracy has been carried out in connivance with America” and that there was a written memo backing his claim that America was behind the campaign to depose him.

“We have it officially, in writing, on record, which says if you remove Imran Khan, Pakistan will be forgiven,” he said.

The White House has denied that the United States is seeking to remove Khan. The U.S. embassy in Islamabad did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

Khan, who has already lost his parliamentary majority after allies quit his coalition government and joined the opposition, urged his supporters to take to the streets on Sunday ahead of the vote.

Hours before he spoke, the head of the army, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, said Pakistan wanted to expand its ties with Washington.

U.S. President Joe Biden has not called Khan since taking office, but the White House has denied that it is seeking to topple him.

Relations are strained in particular over Afghanistan, where Washington accused Pakistan of backing the successful Taliban insurgency that led last year to a chaotic withdrawal of U.S. and allied forces.

Yet while the government has pursued multi-billion dollar development deals with China, the United States’ strategic rival, the army appears keen not to jeopardise relations with Washington, which has in the past supplied it with billions of dollars in military aid.

Bajwa told a security conference in Islamabad that “we share a long history of excellent and strategic relationship with the United States, which remains our largest export market”.

He noted that Pakistan had long enjoyed close diplomatic and business relationships with China, but added: “We seek to expand and broaden our ties with both countries without impacting our relations with the other.”

Published : April 03, 2022

By : Reuters

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President of Argentina Alberto Fernandez awarded veterans and relatives of fallen soldiers from the Falklands War on the 40th anniversary of the beginning of the conflict on Saturday (April 2).

Fernandez requested the United Kingdom to comply with resolution 2065 of the United Nations General Assembly of 1965.

Argentina and Britain have long disputed the sovereignty of the British-run group of islands in the South Atlantic that Argentina knows as the Malvinas. In 1982, that erupted into a short war that claimed the lives of 650 Argentine soldiers and 255 British troops.

The two countries now have cordial relations, although the islands remain a constant source of tension. For the veterans, that is expressed in who is allowed to grieve and how.

The conflict began on April 2, 1982, when Argentine troops landed on the islands, located some 400 miles (644 km) from the Argentine coast. Britain, then led by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, sent a naval task force to retake them. The poorly equipped and trained Argentine troops stood little chance and Argentina surrendered by June.

The war is widely seen as a mistake by a discredited military dictatorship ruling Argentina at the time, but the islands remain a potent national symbol and most Argentines support the South American country’s claims over them.

Published : April 03, 2022

By : Reuters

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https://www.nationthailand.com/international/40014112

The pilot of the Mriya cargo plane, the heaviest aircraft in the world, on Saturday (April 2) said there was no hope for its restoration after it was destroyed by a Russian attack on Hostomel Airport.

Russian forces withdrew from the airport near the capital, which has been subject to fighting since the first day of the conflict, Britain’s Ministry of Defence said in a regular bulletin on Saturday.

Returning to assess the damage at the airport, pilot Dmytro Antonov walked past the wreckages of several planes before reaching what remained of the Antonov-225 Mriya – which in Ukrainian means “dream”.

“The sadness is so indescribable. I just realised that exactly two months ago I went on my last business trip. I flew on Mriya,” he said.

Ukrainian state arms manufacturer Ukroboronprom reported in February that the Mriya, which can carry up to 250 tonnes, had been set ablaze in a Russian attack and that restoring it would cost more than $3 billion.

Published : April 03, 2022

By : Reuters

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https://www.nationthailand.com/international/40014067

Sporting red hair, a striped jumpsuit and eye-catching makeup, a new wax figure of late rock star David Bowie as alter-ego Ziggy Stardust was unveiled at Madame Tussauds in London on Thursday (March 31), completing a music-themed line-up at the museum.

Using measurements and images from a 1983 sitting, Madame Tussauds said it had worked with Bowie’s estate to create the figure, the second to be made in the singer’s likeness at the museum.

The British singer-songwriter died from cancer in 2016, aged 69.

“David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust transcends generations and music genres,” Tim Waters, general manager at Madame Tussauds London, said in a statement.

“We were honoured to work with his estate in what would have been his 75th year and play our small part in keeping his inimitable legacy alive for generations to come.”

The new figure stands in the museum’s revamped Music Festival zone, which also includes replicas of Ariana Grande, Rihanna, Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga, as well as Beyoncé, Amy Winehouse, Jimi Hendrix and Ed Sheeran.

Published : April 01, 2022

By : Reuters

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https://www.nationthailand.com/international/40014066

President Joe Biden on Thursday (March 31) launched the largest release ever from the U.S. emergency oil reserve and challenged oil companies to drill more in an attempt to bring down gasoline prices that have soared during Russia’s war with Ukraine.

The announcement comes as part of a broad effort by Biden to tackle raging inflation that has hurt U.S. consumers and threatens Biden’s fellow Democrats as they seek to maintain control of Congress in the November elections.

Starting in May, the United States will release 1 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil for six months from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), he said.

Analysts Reuters spoke with had mixed reactions to the news.

“Symbolically, good idea, it had some impact on the price of the futures today, and that’s either good or bad, depending on which side of the market you may be speculating on. But in terms of the big supply-demand function? No, it’s not terribly important. Symbolic? Yes. Substantive. Much less so,” said George Ball, Chairman of Sanders Morris Harris. “Although they’re much derided, the state gasoline tax holidays actually do a great deal more for the driver, for the consumer, for the public than what the president announced today.”

“Our belief is that it will be beneficial to consumers because now we will see a reduction in gasoline prices. It should be beneficial to GDP growth because, for every ten dollar increase in oil prices on a prolonged basis, it takes off 20 basis points or one-fifth of one per cent of real GDP. And that works in reverse, too,” said CFRA Research’s Chief Investment Strategist Sam Stovall.

Biden’s 180 million-barrel release is equivalent to about two days of global demand and marks the third time Washington has tapped the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in the past six months.

It will more than cover oil exports to the United States from Russia, which Biden banned this month. Russia typically produces about 10% of the world’s crude, but only accounts for 8% of U.S. liquid fuel imports.

But the release will fall short of a loss of about 3 million bpd of Russian oil which the International Energy Agency estimates will be lost to global markets amid Western sanctions and as global buyers avoid the oil.

Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin is demanding foreign buyers pay for Russian gas in roubles from Friday (April 1) or else have their supplies cut, a move European capitals rejected.

Putin’s move, via a decree signed on Thursday (March 31), leaves Europe facing the prospect of losing more than a third of its gas supply. Germany, the most heavily reliant on Russia, has already activated an emergency plan that could lead to rationing in Europe’s biggest economy.

“European countries have a short term problem. They import something like 155 billion cubic feet of gas from Russia every year, and that can’t be made up by liquid national gas or other supplies from the US or elsewhere over the very short term. So they’ve got a big current dependency problem that over the long term is is almost certainly going to cause them to seek alternative sources. The U.S. can supply, for example, much of the LNG needs to go to Europe to substitute for Russia. But it will take us 10 years to build the production and the export capacity to do that. In the short term, a big problem. Longer-term, it may actually end up kicking Russia in its ass by what they’re demanding today,” Ball said.

It was not immediately clear whether in practice there might be a way for foreign firms to continue payment without using roubles, which the European Union and G7 group of states have ruled out.

A source told Reuters that payments for gas delivered in April on some contracts started in the second half of April and May for others, suggesting the taps might not be turned off immediately.

Published : April 01, 2022

By : Reuters

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https://www.nationthailand.com/international/40014061

Using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, scientists have discovered the most distant individual star on record, a bright behemoth they nicknamed Earendel – Old English for “morning star” – because it existed during the dawn of the universe.

Researchers said the star, very hot and blue in colour, was estimated at 50 to 100 times the mass of our sun while being millions of times brighter. Its light travelled for 12.9 billion years before reaching Earth, meaning that the star existed when the universe was just 7 per cent of its current age.

Earendel was born roughly 900 million years after the Big Bang event at the outset of the universe. It belonged to among the earliest generations of stars at a time when the universe was quite different than it is today.

“This really opens up a new window into those early days of the universe,” said astronomer Brian Welch of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, lead author of the research published this week in the journal Nature.

“We’re seeing the star in the time period that is often referred to as Cosmic Dawn – when the first light in the universe was starting to turn on with these first stars and when the first galaxies are starting to form,” Welch added.

Explaining its nickname, Welch said the researchers figured that the “morning star” existing during the Cosmic Dawn period was “a good parallel.”

“It’s also for the ‘Lord of the Rings’ nerds out there,” he added, noting that Earendel is the same Old English word that author J.R.R. Tolkien used for inspiration for a character from his work “The Silmarillion” that becomes a star.

In observing objects as distant as Earendel, scientists are peering into the deep past because of the vast distance the light from the star travelled to reach Earth – in a sense, using Hubble as a time machine.

“So normally when we look at very distant objects, what we’re seeing is the light from an entire galaxy – so millions of stars all blended together – and we’ve been able to see those out to even farther distances. But in this case, thanks to a very massive cluster of galaxies in the foreground, the light from this one star has just been very, very highly magnified, so we’re able to see this single star at a much greater distance,” Welch said.

The first Hubble images of Earendel were obtained in 2016, with 2019 follow-up observations. The researchers are hoping to study it further using the next-generation James Webb Space Telescope, due to become operational within months after being launched in December.

Welch said the researchers were surprised by the discovery, saying, “Yeah, there was definitely a period of wondering whether this could possibly be real.”

Until now, the most distant single star on record was one nicknamed Icarus which existed 4 billion years after Earendel.

Earendel was probably much different than the stars populating the universe today. Welch said it was likely composed mostly of hydrogen and helium, with perhaps trace amounts of heavier elements including carbon, nitrogen and oxygen.

Welch said the first stars formed roughly 100 million years after the Big Bang explosion and that perhaps one or two generations of stars had preceded Earendel’s formation.

Heavier elements did not exist until they were forged in the fusion caldrons of the cores of the initial generations of stars, then were blasted into space when these earliest stars exploded at the end of their life cycles.

Even though scientists on Earth can now see its light, Earendel itself certainly no longer exists, with such huge stars having relatively short lifespans, Welch said. It existed for perhaps a few hundred million years before dying in a supernova explosion.

“Massive stars tend to live fast and die young,” Welch said.

Published : April 01, 2022

By : Reuters

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https://www.nationthailand.com/international/40014058

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Thursday (March 31) said the situation in the south and the Donbas region remained extremely difficult and reiterated that Russia was building up forces near the besieged city of Mariupol.

And in a rare sign of internal dissent, Zelenskiy also said in a video address that he had sacked two senior members of the national security service on the grounds they were traitors.

Zelenskiy, who often uses colourful imagery, said the Russians were so evil and so keen on destruction that they seemed to be from another world, “monsters who burn and plunder, who attack and are bent on murder.”

Russia says it is carrying out a “special operation” to disarm and “denazify” its neighbour.

Moscow also denies Kyiv’s accusations that Russian forces are targeting civilians.

Zelenskiy said Ukrainian forces had pushed back the Russians from Kyiv and Chernihiv – two cities Moscow had announced would no longer be the focus of attacks as they seek to secure the separatist Donbas and Luhansk regions in the south-east.

“There will be battles ahead. We still need to go down a very difficult path to get everything we want,” he said.

“The situation in the south and in the Donbas remains extremely difficult.”

Zelenskiy also said he had fired two top officials at the national security service – the overall head of internal security as well as the head of the agency’s branch in the Kherson region.

“I do not have time to deal with all the traitors, but they will gradually all be punished,” he said, adding that the two men had betrayed their oath to defend Ukraine.

He did not give specific details.

The occasion marked the first time Zelenskiy has announced high-profile sackings of those involved in Ukraine’s defence.

Published : April 01, 2022

By : Reuters